He had not gone fifty steps when he heard the sound of a shot.
He turned round.
Daubrecq had blown his brains out.
“De profundis!” murmured Lupin, taking off his hat.
Two months later, Gilbert, whose sentence had been commuted to one of penal servitude for life, made his escape from the Île de Ré, on the day before that on which he was to have been transported to New Caledonia.
It was a strange escape. Its least details remained difficult to understand; and, like the two shots on the Boulevard Arago, it greatly enhanced Arsène Lupin’s prestige.
“Taken all round,” said Lupin to me, one day, after telling me the different episodes of the story, “taken all around, no enterprise has ever given me more trouble or cost me greater exertions than that confounded adventure which, if you don’t mind, we will call, The Crystal Stopper; or, Never Say Die. In twelve hours, between six o’clock in the morning and six o’clock in the evening, I made up for six months of bad luck, blunders, gropings in the dark and reverses. I certainly count those twelve hours among the finest and the most glorious of my life.”
“And Gilbert?” I asked. “What became of him?”
“He is farming his own land, way down in Algeria, under his real name, his only name of Antoine Mergy. He is married to an Englishwoman, and they have a son whom he insisted on calling Arsène. I often receive a bright, chatty, warm-hearted letter from him.”